A soft 404 is a page that returns an HTTP 200 OK status code — telling crawlers 'this page exists and is fine' — while the actual content says the page wasn't found (an empty product page, a 'sorry, page not found' message, or a near-empty template). The status code and the content disagree, which confuses search engines about whether the URL is real.

Google has to spend crawl budget repeatedly fetching URLs that are effectively dead, instead of crawling your real content. Soft 404s can get indexed as thin, low-value pages that drag down site quality signals. Google also flags them in Search Console's coverage report, and they make legitimate broken links harder to find because they don't return a true 404.

It fetches the page, confirms it returns a 200 status, then analyzes the content for soft-404 signals: very low word count (thin content), title or body text containing phrases like 'not found', '404', 'no longer exists', 'no results', or 'page doesn't exist', and other empty-state indicators. When a 200 page shows these signals, it's flagged as a likely soft 404.

It depends on intent. If the page is genuinely gone, return a real 404 (content removed temporarily) or 410 (permanently gone) status. If the content moved, 301-redirect to the new URL. If it's a legitimate empty state (e.g., an out-of-stock product you want to keep), add substantive content and make sure the page is genuinely useful, not an error message.

It can be treated as one by Google if it returns 200 with 'no results found' and little else. Best practice for empty internal search or filter pages is to either noindex them, return a 404 when there are zero results, or populate the page with helpful alternatives and related links so it isn't a dead end. This tool flags low-content 'no results' pages.

Yes. Redirecting all deleted pages to your homepage with a 301 is a classic soft-404 pattern — Google often treats such redirects as soft 404s because the destination doesn't match the requested content. For removed pages, prefer a proper 404/410, or redirect only to a closely related, equivalent page rather than dumping users on the homepage.

A hard 404 correctly returns the 404 status code, so crawlers immediately understand the page doesn't exist and stop indexing it. A soft 404 returns 200 (or sometimes a 301 to an irrelevant page) while showing not-found content, so crawlers waste effort and may index the dead URL. The fix is to make the status code honest about the page's real state.